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🎨 Adobe: AI Scare Trade

2026-03-13 20:02:08

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Today at a glance:

  1. 🎨 Adobe: AI Scare Trade

  2. 🎟️ Live Nation: Keeping Ticketmaster

  3. 🤖 Meta: Going Deeper Into Custom AI Chips


🎨 Adobe: AI Scare Trade

Adobe’s Q1 2026 results came with the end of an era.

The architect of Adobe’s cloud transformation, CEO Shantanu Narayen plans to step down after 18 years. Despite beating estimates across the board, shares fell about 7% as investors weighed leadership uncertainty and persistent fears around AI disruption.

Adobe’s AI strategy is starting to show up in the numbers:

  • Double beat: Revenue grew 12% Y/Y to $6.4 billion ($120 million beat). Non-GAAP EPS reached $6.06, well above the $5.87 expected.

  • Strong user growth: Monthly active users reached 850 million (+17% Y/Y). Creative Premium MAU surged 50%, fueled by the freemium funnel for Express and Firefly.

  • Cash powerhouse: Adobe generated nearly $3 billion in operating cash flow and maintained a sky-high non-GAAP operating margin of 47%.

  • Next billion-dollar business: ARR from AI-first applications such as Firefly for Enterprise more than tripled Y/Y. Firefly ARR has already crossed $250 million, and Narayen called it Adobe’s next billion-dollar pillar. Still, it remains a tiny portion of total ARR, which grew 11% to $26.1 billion.

Chart preview
Source: Fiscal.ai

The CEO transition follows a similar move at Workday, where the CEO recently stepped aside for a founder-led AI pivot. Narayen will remain as Chair of the Board and CEO until a successor is found. The timing of the exit is curious, given that the board recently approved a new long-term performance share program for Narayen that doesn't vest until early 2029.

This transition comes at a delicate time for the company. AI is a growth engine, but it is also a double-edged sword. Adobe said its traditional stock business, which generates $450 million a year, is declining faster than expected as users shift to generative AI alternatives. This shift captures the core SaaSpocalypse anxiety. The company is successfully selling AI tools, but those tools are also cannibalizing its own high-margin legacy segments.

Adobe is betting its 850 million user base will eventually graduate into paid tiers as they hit AI paywalls for advanced generative features. Q2 guidance was ahead of Wall Street estimates, targeting revenue of $6.43-$6.48 billion, but it still implies a slowdown (+9-10% Y/Y). For a company trying to prove AI can bring reacceleration, single-digit growth is nothing to write home about.

The market remains deeply skeptical, with shares down nearly 30% so far in 2026. At less than 12x forward earnings, Adobe is no longer priced like a premium software franchise. The challenge for the next CEO is straightforward: prove Adobe can turn its AI funnel into durable monetization before rivals and AI-native tools reshape the category around it.


🎟️ Live Nation: Keeping Ticketmaster

The long-running antitrust battle over Live Nation and Ticketmaster took a surprising turn this week.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) reached a settlement with Live Nation, allowing the company to keep Ticketmaster and avoid the structural breakup regulators had initially pursued. Importantly, the deal does not include a federal financial penalty.

Instead, the agreement focuses on operational concessions designed to increase competition:

  • Ticketmaster must allow venues to sell up to 50% of tickets through rival marketplaces.

  • Service fees at Live Nation-controlled venues will be capped at 15%.

  • The company must terminate exclusive ticketing agreements at 13 amphitheaters and offer both exclusive and non-exclusive ticketing proposals going forward.

  • The existing DOJ consent decree will be extended for eight years with stronger oversight provisions.

One detail jumps out in how Live Nation makes money. Despite dominating the live events ecosystem, Live Nation’s profits remain surprisingly thin. The company generated $25.2 billion in revenue but only $0.7 billion in net income in FY25, a net margin of just 3%.

That’s because the bulk of the business is concert promotion, where most ticket revenue flows to artists and production costs. Critics argue the company’s market power lies less in massive margins and more in control of the ecosystem (promotion, venues, and ticketing all under one roof).

The biggest headline today is that Ticketmaster stays inside the empire.

Breaking up Live Nation’s ticketing and promotion businesses had been the core structural risk hanging over the stock since the lawsuit was filed in 2024.

However, the legal fight is far from over.

More than two dozen US states rejected the settlement and plan to continue pursuing the case in court, arguing that the agreement fails to address what they view as a monopoly over live events.

Live Nation has set aside $280 million to cover potential damages tied to those state claims.

For now, the outcome removes the most extreme scenario of a forced divestiture of Ticketmaster. But it leaves a lingering legal overhang as the state-led case moves forward.


🤖 Meta: Going Deeper Into Custom AI Chips

Meta unveiled a roadmap for four new in-house AI chips this week: MTIA 300, 400, 450, and 500. The chips will roll out through 2027 and are designed to support everything from content ranking and recommendations to gen AI inference.

The bigger point is inference. Meta is increasingly designing chips not just for training models, but for running AI workloads efficiently at scale. This matters because AI is becoming a much larger cost center for Meta.

It also hints at a narrower focus. Earlier this month, reports said Meta had scrapped some of its most ambitious training-chip efforts, including Iris and Olympus, after design struggles. That makes this roadmap look less like a full challenge to NVIDIA and more like a focused attempt to optimize the workloads Meta knows best.

Meta is not doing this alone. The MTIA family is being co-developed with Broadcom, which gives Meta access to proven silicon expertise while accelerating its roadmap. Meta wants to hit a blistering 6-month release cadence to ensure its hardware doesn’t become obsolete before it even reaches the data center.

Despite this in-house push, Meta is still spending billions with NVIDIA and AMD. In fact, Meta just signed a massive $100 billion deal with AMD for 6 gigawatts of MI450 GPUs. Ultimately, the goal is not to replace third-party chips overnight, but to diversify suppliers, lower costs, and better optimize chips for its own workloads.

Every recommendation, every generated image, every chatbot response has to run somewhere. If Meta can lower inference costs across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and its ad stack, the savings add up fast.

There is still execution risk. Custom chips are expensive to design, take years to bring into production, and only really pay off at huge scale. Meta is betting that better bandwidth density can lower the cost of inference at scale.

Inference is often constrained less by raw compute than by how quickly data can move between memory and processors. By designing for this specific constraint, Meta claims that the MTIA 500 will deliver 27.6 TB/s of bandwidth, potentially outperforming even NVIDIA’s specialized Rubin chips for Meta’s internal workloads.

Chart preview
Source: Fiscal.ai

The biggest AI spenders increasingly want more control over their own infrastructure economics. After spending over $70 billion in 2025, Meta is guiding to $115–$135 billion in capital expenditures in 2026. It’s the third-largest infrastructure budget, only behind Amazon and Google.

Meta’s AI bill is getting so large that even small efficiency gains start to matter. Custom chips are becoming one of the clearest ways to protect margins as inference scales.


That’s it for today!

Happy investing!

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Disclosure: I own AMZN, AMD, AVGO, GOOG, LYV, META, and NVDA in App Economy Portfolio. I share my ratings (BUY, SELL, or HOLD) with App Economy Portfolio members.

Author's Note (Bertrand here 👋🏼): The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are solely my own and should not be considered financial advice or any other organization's views.

☁️ Oracle: The Art of Leverage

2026-03-11 06:53:46

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📊 Check out 100+ companies visualized in our latest monthly report.


Big Tech heads to the bond market for AI

Alphabet sold a $31.5 billion global bond deal in February to help fund its AI expansion. Amazon is now targeting at least $37 billion in a new bond sale tied to AI infrastructure.

Oracle, meanwhile, said it plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion this year through a mix of debt and equity to expand cloud capacity.

What makes Oracle different is the balance-sheet starting point. Alphabet and Amazon are raising debt from a position of financial strength. Oracle is trying to finance its AI buildout while already carrying a reputation as the most leveraged among the major tech platforms.

New reports suggest Oracle is preparing thousands of job cuts and slowing hiring as the cost of that buildout mounts. The debate is now all about how much financial strain Oracle must absorb before that demand turns into durable returns.

Free cash flow flipped to negative $25 billion in the trailing 12 months (TTM), with $11 billion used in Q3 alone. What could possibly go wrong?

Chart preview
Source: Fiscal.ai

ORCL is trading over 50% below its September peak. The stock has always been central to Larry Ellison’s empire. Now it matters even more, because that equity is helping support the family’s massive Warner bet.

Let’s see what we learned this quarter.

Today at a glance:

  1. ☁️ Oracle: The Art of Leverage

  2. 🤖 Microsoft: Borrowing Anthropic’s Best Trick


1. ☁️ Oracle: The Art of Leverage

Q3 FY26 key metrics:

  • ☁️ Revenue growth accelerated (with a catch): Total revenue reached $17.2 billion, up 22% Y/Y. In constant currency, growth was just 18%, meaning some of the upside came from FX rather than from underlying demand.

  • 📦 Backlog keeps climbing: RPO reached $553 billion, up 325% Y/Y and 6% sequentially. Management also said many new AI contracts require less Oracle funding because customers are prepaying or supplying GPUs directly.

  • ⚡ OCI accelerated again: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) revenue grew 84% Y/Y to $4.9 billion, up from 68% last quarter. Total cloud revenue rose 44% to $8.9 billion, while multicloud database revenue surged 531%.

  • 💵 Guidance moved higher: Management reaffirmed FY26 revenue guidance of $67 billion and raised FY27 revenue guidance by $4 billion to $90 billion.

Income statement:

  • Revenue grew +22% Y/Y to $17.2 billion ($0.3 billion beat).

    • ☁️ Cloud +44% Y/Y to $8.9 billion.

    • 🌐 Software +3% Y/Y to $6.1 billion.

    • 🖥️ Hardware +2% Y/Y to $0.7 billion.

    • 💼 Services +12% Y/Y to $1.4 billion.

  • The shift to IaaS compressed gross margins to 65% (-6pp Y/Y).

  • Operating margin was 32% (+1pp Y/Y).

Cash flow:

  • Operating cash flow TTM was up 13% to $24 billion.

  • Free cash flow TTM was negative $25 billion and remains under immense pressure due to the CapEx ramp.

  • Management kept the FY26 capital expenditure outlook intact at $50 billion.

Balance sheet:

  • Net debt: $114 billion (over 4x net leverage based on $28 billion EBITDA TTM).

Chart preview
Source: Fiscal.ai

So what to make of all this?

Read more

📊 PRO: This Week in Visuals

2026-03-07 23:02:59

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Premium members get:

  • 📊 Monthly reports: 200+ companies visualized.

  • 📩 Tuesday articles: Exclusive deep dives and insights.

  • 📚 Access to our archive: Hundreds of business breakdowns.

PRO members get everything PLUS:

  • 📩 Saturday PRO reports: Timely insights on the latest earnings.


Today at a glance:

  1. 🛒 Costco: E-Commerce Surge

  2. 🦎 Berkshire: Abel Takes the Reins

  3. 📶 Marvell: Surprise Data Center Demand

  4. 🌊 Sea: Margin Fears Overshadow Growth

  5. 🎯 Target: Turnaround Takes Root

  6. 🚚 JD.com: Price War Takes Its Toll

  7. 👟 Adidas: New Mid-Term Targets

  8. 🧑‍⚕️ Veeva: Agentic Transformation

  9. 🌱 MongoDB: Guidance Anxiety

  10. 🌐 Samsara: AI Takes the Wheel

  11. 👟 On: Incoming Deceleration

  12. 🔐 Okta: Securing the AI Agent Era

  13. 🛒 Best Buy: Profits Outshine Sales Dip

  14. 💳 StoneCo: Back to Basics

  15. 🛠️ GitLab: Growth Hiccup

  16. 📝 Asana: Agentic Transition


1. 🛒 Costco: E-Commerce Surge

Costco delivered another strong beat across the board for its Q2 FY26 (ending in February). Total revenue rose 9% Y/Y to $69.6 billion ($280 million beat), while GAAP EPS came in at $4.58 ($0.04 beat).

When stripping out the volatility of gas prices and foreign exchange, core comparable sales grew 7% globally, driven by a 3% increase in foot traffic and a 4% jump in the average customer ticket.

Digitally-enabled comparable sales growth accelerated to 23% Y/Y. Management highlighted that new digital enhancements are driving meaningful improvements in both sales and checkout speeds. That includes things like personalized product recommendations, mobile wallet upgrades, and automated pay stations.

Memberships continue to be a growth and profit driver, generating $1.4 billion in fee income (up 14% Y/Y). While the worldwide renewal rate held steady sequentially at 89.7%, the US and Canada renewal rate ticked down another 10 basis points to 92.1%, reflecting the ongoing trend of younger online shoppers renewing at slightly lower rates than traditional in-store signups.

The most notable development during the earnings call centered on tariffs. Following the Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down previous global tariffs, CEO Ron Vachris stated the company is actively evaluating potential refunds. Consistent with Costco’s “first to lower, last to raise” philosophy, Vachris committed to returning any recovered tariff funds directly to members through lower prices. To manage the new wave of tariffs currently proposed, the company is shifting supply chains and leaning heavier on its Kirkland Signature private label.

The market continues to pay up for Costco’s execution, with the stock trading at nearly 48x forward earnings.

Chart preview
Source: Fiscal.ai

2. 🦎 Berkshire: Abel Takes the Reins

Berkshire Hathaway’s fourth quarter marked the official beginning of the Greg Abel era, but the headline numbers triggered a post-earnings selloff. Q4 operating earnings dropped 30% to $10.2 billion, sending shares down nearly 5%. However, the headline decline was exacerbated by a steep $1.6 billion non-cash goodwill impairment charge tucked into the annual report, likely related to its Pilot truck-stop business. Adjusting for this charge, the operating decline was closer to 19%.

The primary drag on the quarter was a sharp reversal in insurance underwriting profits, which slumped 54% to $1.6 billion amid rising claims and intense competition. Geico was particularly weak, taking a hit from higher advertising expenses.

For the full-year FY25, revenue was flat and operating earnings were slightly down.

Berkshire’s legendary cash pile remains near record highs at $373 billion. Despite the massive war chest and a recent dip in the stock price, Berkshire’s buyback drought has now extended to six consecutive quarters. The conglomerate also remained a net seller of equities, unloading $3.2 billion in the quarter. In his inaugural shareholder letter, CEO Greg Abel explicitly ruled out a cash dividend, maintaining that capital will only be retained if it creates more than a dollar of market value for every dollar kept.

Chart preview
Source: Fiscal.ai

Abel used his first letter to reassure investors that Warren Buffett’s core values of capital discipline and long-term investing remain firmly intact. While Abel is now CEO, the company disclosed that he must still consult with Buffett (now Chairman) before authorizing any stock repurchases. While avoiding quarterly earnings calls like his predecessor, Abel did announce a slight change to the upcoming annual meeting in May, which will feature deeper bench executives like BNSF’s Katie Farmer and NetJets’ Adam Johnson.


3. 📶 Marvell: Surprise Data Center Demand

Read more

📈 Broadcom: $100B AI Target

2026-03-06 21:03:09

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Altman vs. Amodei

The AI race is heating up in unexpected ways.

This week, tensions spilled into the open between OpenAI and Anthropic. According to a report by The Information, a leaked internal memo from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei accused OpenAI of “mendacious” messaging in its dispute with the Pentagon, even taking a swipe at Sam Altman’s ties to the Trump administration.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference on Wednesday, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirmed that OpenAI is preparing to go public later this year (stay tuned for our visuals!). Huang noted that this looming IPO is why NVIDIA finalized a $30 billion investment now, rather than a previously rumored $100 billion deal.

The AI boom is forcing companies to rethink everything, from geopolitics to infrastructure spending. Two earnings reports this week offered a glimpse into how the AI economy is taking shape.

Today at a glance:

  1. 📈 Broadcom: $100 Billion AI Target

  2. 🦅 CrowdStrike: AI Fears Reality Check


1. 📈 Broadcom: $100 Billion AI Target

Broadcom released its Q1 FY26 (January quarter) with a massive top-and-bottom-line beat and one of the most aggressive outlooks in the semiconductor space. Q1 revenue rose 29% Y/Y to $19.3 billion ($0.2 billion beat), and non-GAAP EPS reached $2.05 ($0.03 beat).

The AI growth engine is accelerating faster than anticipated.

  • The Semiconductor solutions segment rose 52% Y/Y to $12.5 billion. Within that segment, AI revenue more than doubled (+106% Y/Y) to $8.4 billion

  • The Infrastructure software segment, housing VMware, contributed $6.8 billion (up 1% Y/Y).

CEO Hock Tan dropped a bombshell during the earnings call to dispel any fears of an AI slowdown. Broadcom expects its AI chip sales to top a staggering $100 billion in 2027. Tan assured analysts that the company already has the “line of sight” and the secured supply chain to hit this milestone.

If achieved, that would cement Broadcom as the premier alternative to NVIDIA for custom AI accelerators and networking chips.

Custom Silicon Gold Rush

Much of the momentum is coming from hyperscalers designing custom AI accelerators rather than relying solely on GPUs. Broadcom builds these chips—often called XPUs—for some of the largest AI companies in the world.

Management confirmed the company now has six major AI customers, with OpenAI recently joining the roster.

  • Together, they represent ~10 gigawatts of AI compute demand for 2027.

  • OpenAI alone is expected to deploy over 1 gigawatt of capacity by then.

Much of this demand is tied to inference workloads, as AI labs move from training models to deploying them into real-world products.

Networking Becomes the Bottleneck

Large AI clusters require enormous bandwidth to connect thousands of accelerators operating simultaneously. Broadcom is benefiting from that constraint.

The company is seeing strong demand for its 100-terabit networking switches, which are becoming essential components of modern AI systems.

Management expects AI networking to account for roughly 33% to 40% of total AI revenue over time.

Guidance

For Q2 FY26, Broadcom expects revenue of roughly $22 billion, far above the $20.5 billion consensus, with adjusted EBITDA margins holding steady near 68%. AI semiconductor revenue alone is projected to reach $10.7 billion next quarter (up 27% sequentially), highlighting the rapid ramp in hyperscaler AI deployments.


2. 🦅 CrowdStrike: AI Fears Reality Check

During its 2023 Fal.Con Investor Briefing, CrowdStrike set an ambitious target of $10 billion in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) within 5 to 7 years.

The company just crossed the halfway mark, surpassing $5 billion in ARR. That’s despite a massive IT outage in July 2024 that caused widespread disruption.

The milestone arrives at an interesting moment. Cybersecurity stocks have recently sold off on fears that advanced AI tools could disrupt traditional software models. CrowdStrike’s latest results suggest the opposite. AI may be expanding the threat surface faster than defenses can keep up.

Revenue in Q4 FY26 (January quarter) grew 23% Y/Y to $1.31 billion ($10 million beat), and non-GAAP EPS landed at $1.12 (a $0.02 beat).

Free cash flow surged 57% Y/Y to a record $376 million, representing a 29% margin. However, the figure is partially boosted by stock-based compensation (SBC).

CrowdStrike is nearly turning a GAAP operating profit, a milestone that remains elusive for many software companies that rely heavily on SBC. For CrowdStrike, SBC was 23% of revenue in FY26. That’s a very high level and hasn’t shown signs of going down over time.

Chart preview
Source: Fiscal.ai

The headline metrics confirm the post-outage recovery is fully complete and the company is back in growth mode.

  • Ending ARR rose 24% Y/Y to $5.25 billion, accelerating from 23% Y/Y in Q3.

  • Net New ARR is a critical metric for business momentum. Q4 FY26 net new ARR hit $331 million, a massive 47% Y/Y rebound. Q4 is typically the strongest quarter seasonally. Compared to Q4 FY24 (pre-outage), net new ARR was up 17%.

The broader cybersecurity sector has been under severe pressure lately, driven by investor anxiety that advanced AI tools (like Anthropic’s new code-scanning features) will disrupt traditional software models. CEO George Kurtz aggressively pushed back against this narrative, stating that the AI revolution is weaponizing adversaries and creating a massive growth opportunity for CrowdStrike.

Instead of replacing cybersecurity software, AI is expanding the attack surface. CrowdStrike is responding by building tools designed specifically to secure the AI stack.

The company’s platform strategy is central to that response.

Flex Engine and Consolidation

The Falcon Flex licensing model remains a powerful growth engine. Customers commit to a security budget upfront and allocate it over time across Falcon modules. CrowdStrike now counts over 1,600 Flex customers, each with an average ARR above $1 million. The model reduces purchasing friction and encourages platform consolidation:

  • 50% of customers use six or more modules

  • 24% use eight or more

  • 380 Flex customers expanded commitments this quarter, lifting ARR by an average of 26%.

Securing the AI Stack

To address these new AI attack surfaces, CrowdStrike is rapidly expanding its platform footprint.

  • Next-Gen SIEM: The module grew by more than 75% Y/Y, reaching over $585 million in ending ARR, proving it is successfully disrupting legacy incumbents.

  • M&A Expansion: The company recently acquired SGNL to secure AI identities and Seraphic to protect the enterprise browser, viewing the browser as the primary gateway for AI applications.

  • AI-DR: The newly launched AI Detection and Response offering is seeing explosive demand, growing over 5x quarter-over-quarter as enterprises seek visibility into how employees use AI tools.

Guidance

For FY27, management expects revenue to grow 23% Y/Y to $5.9 billion, slightly ahead of consensus and implying no slowdown. Free cash flow margins are expected to exceed 30%, but investors will be watching whether stock-based compensation finally begins to normalize.


That’s it for today!

Happy investing!

How They Make Money Premium members unlock hundreds of visuals every quarter


Want to sponsor this newsletter? Get in touch here.


Thanks to Fiscal.ai for being our official data partner. Create your own charts and pull key metrics from 50,000+ companies directly on Fiscal.ai. Save 15% with this link.


Disclosure: I own AVGO and CRWD in App Economy Portfolio. I share my ratings (BUY, SELL, or HOLD) with App Economy Portfolio members.

Author's Note (Bertrand here 👋🏼): The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are solely my own and should not be considered financial advice or any other organization's views.

🏔️ The $111B Hollywood Gamble

2026-03-03 21:02:14

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If you are experiencing a severe case of déjà vu, don’t worry.

Just a few weeks ago, we were breaking down the seismic $83 billion deal that was supposed to turn Netflix into the ultimate entertainment conglomerate. We analyzed the spin-offs, incoming regulatory steps, and the future of Warner Bros. without the cable anchor. It felt like a done deal.

As of today, that deal is officially dead.

In a move straight out of a prestige HBO drama, Paramount Skydance hiked its bid to $31 per share in cash to swallow the entire company, including its linear channels and massive debt.

On the same day, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters officially walked away, refusing to engage in a bidding war.

It’s a total reversal for the industry.

  • Netflix wanted to cherry-pick the IP and leave the legacy TV business behind.

  • Paramount is doubling down on the old-school studio model, embracing the linear bundle, and promising a theatrical-first future.

Today, we’re unpacking the new $111 billion acquisition. We’ll look at the massive debt pile, the $7 billion regulatory insurance policy, and why this shotgun wedding has California’s Attorney General reaching for his briefcase.

Let’s unpack the deal, the drama, and the data.

Today at a glance:

  1. Why Netflix Walked

  2. What Para+Warner Looks Like

  3. Eye-popping Leverage

  4. Regulatory Gauntlet

  5. Winners & Losers (updated)


1. Why Netflix Walked

Netflix officially pulled the plug right after WBD’s board declared Paramount’s $111 billion bid a “superior proposal” on February 26. The company ultimately chose its balance sheet over a bidding war.

In a joint statement, Sarandos and Peters candidly explained:

“We’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive. This was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.”

The gap between the two offers was not only about value, but also about the nature of the deal. Netflix was only interested in the clean assets (Studios and HBO Max), requiring a complex spin-off of the declining linear networks into Discovery Global.

David Ellison, backed by his billionaire father Larry, made it easy for WBD’s board. They took everything. For WBD management, a clean cash exit at $31/share was simply too good to pass up compared to the messy, tax-intensive spin-off Netflix required.

Netflix investors cheered the move. The stock jumped 14% immediately after the announcement. By walking away, Netflix avoids the winner’s curse of overpaying for no-growth assets.

While Paramount inherits a mountain of debt, Netflix walks away with its balance sheet intact and a $2.8 billion cash consolation prize. This break-up fee was immediately paid by Paramount to Netflix to clear the board.


2. What Para+Warner Looks Like

What happens when two debt-heavy media companies facing structural decline merge? Let’s take an educated guess.

Paramount is buying the entire house, creating a media colossus that looks more like a 20th-century conglomerate than a 21st-century tech platform.

Let’s visualize the two companies:

  • 3 similar segments:

    • 📺 Linear TV: The lion’s share of revenue & profit, but declining.

    • 🎥 Studios: Hit or miss based on new theatrical releases.

    • 📱 Streaming: Slow-growing and low-margin for now.

  • Over 211 million direct-to-consumer (DTC) subscribers:

    • HBO Max & Discovery+: 132 million (+13% Y/Y).

    • Paramount+ 79 million (+4% Y/Y).

  • ~$96 billion in net debt. This includes $39 billion in combined net debt as of December, $54 billion in new debt commitments, and the $2.8 billion breakup fee paid to Netflix. While Paramount claims a $79 billion pro forma net debt figure, that likely reflects creative accounting and aggressive exclusions.

  • Under $12 billion in adjusted EBITDA in FY25:

    • WBD: $8.7 billion, slowly declining in the past two years.

    • PSKY: $2.7 billion (with a $3.8 billion outlook for FY26).

Chart preview
Source: Fiscal.ai

In their official merger announcement, Paramount asked for a leap of faith.

Paramount is asking investors to trade on a 4x leverage hypothetical future while living in an 8x leverage present. The bridge between those two numbers starts with a staggering $6 billion in promised synergies. In an industry where integration is notoriously messy, it’s a high-stakes bet.

Are we supposed to believe EBITDA will leap from less than $12 billion to more than $20 billion while the core profit centers (linear networks) are in a freefall?

WBD and Paramount combined for ~$15 billion in SG&A expenses last year. In an industry with iron-clad union contracts and massive marketing requirements, cutting ~40% of overhead is a bold claim.

Netflix, the masters of tech efficiency, believed it could only find $2.5 billion in savings. Paramount is claiming it can find $6 billion. This $3.5 billion gap has our BS-meter working overtime.

It’s possible management is double-counting synergies across Paramount Skydance and the WBD merger. Warner has already been restructured multiple times and ultimately chose to sell itself. Finding another massive round of savings won’t be easy.

How many times can you make an organization leaner before something breaks?

The bull case pitched to investors

To justify the debt mountain, Paramount is pitching a very specific vision of the future.

Read more

📊 Earnings Visuals (2/2026)

2026-03-01 23:02:36

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🔥 The February report is here, with over 100 businesses visualized!

All the key earnings from the past month in one report.

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Download the full report below or log in to your account.

Here’s a sneak peek. 👀

What to expect in our monthly report?

🤖 Big Tech & AI

  • Hyperscalers: Google, Amazon.

  • Hardware: HP, Lenovo, Samsung.

  • Infrastructure: Arista, Cisco, Dell, Palo Alto.

  • Chip Design: NVIDIA, AMD, ARM, Qualcomm.

💳 Fintech & Commerce

  • Crypto: Circle, Coinbase, Robinhood.

  • Gig Economy: Uber, DoorDash, Airbnb, Grab, Instacart.

  • Payments: Adyen, PayPal, Block, Nu, Klarna, Affirm, Toast.

  • Global Commerce: MercadoLibre, Coupang, Shopify, Global-e.

🧠 Enterprise & Data Intelligence

  • Cybersecurity: Cloudflare, Zscaler, Fortinet.

  • Productivity: HubSpot, Zoom, Monday, Intuit.

  • Data & AI: Palantir, Snowflake, Datadog, Elastic.

  • Software Stack: Salesforce, Workday, Atlassian.

🛍️ Consumer Brands

  • FMCG: Hershey, Kraft, Mondelēz.

  • Luxury: Hermès, Kering, L’Oréal, Ferrari.

  • Buffett Basket: Berkshire, Coca-Cola, Moody’s.

  • Retail & Apparel: Walmart, Amer Sports, Birkenstock.

🍿 Media & Entertainment

  • Sports betting: DraftKings, Flutter.

  • Gaming: Roblox, Nintendo, Sony, Take-Two.

  • Streaming: Disney, Warner, Paramount, Roku.

  • Social & Ads: Reddit, Snap, Spotify, The Trade Desk, Applovin.

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